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Where the Heart Is – Home is…

…where the people you care about are; where you desire to be; feel the warmth and safety of the walls surrounding you; comfort and fellow feeling between you and your friends and family. This is, in a way, your condensed world. Abuja was this kind of home for me in the last months…

Like always everything comes to an end and so my assignment as well. It is been a privilege to work for the Essential Medicine Team and I have a lot of great memories. Some of these great memories are from the last weeks.

I travel to Niger and facilitated the Bio Medical Engineering cascade training with my colleagues from the state team. We worked with the Master Bio Medical Engineering Trainers from our previous training in Lagos to organize and host these three-day cascade training. Nevertheless, there were great gains taken away by the participants as reflected in their final feedback.

Another remarkable achievement was the completion of the oxygen commodities installation in the Emergency Pediatric Unit in Niger. We all together completed the first in the state installation and checked functionally with a bubble test and an oxygen analyzer. This unit is ready for our small patients. It was one of other installation in the three states. For the end years all these installations are fantastic achievement of the team’s effort. I am proud to be part of it.

Moreover, we attended a typical Nigerien episode at the central medical store. As we completed our inspection of oxygen commodities in the morning and headed to the hospital to start the installations. We received a call that the Director of Ministry of Health, Represent of Public & Heath are on the way and requires our present. So we are heading back and joining the first people to wait for the remaining people. It took some little Nigerien time and finally 16 people joined the inspection of only two commodities. Unfortunately, the remaining commodities are still on its way to us. Everyone were happy and we completed this episode with some prayers.

All Volunteers rounded up their assignment with a final brown bag session. My topic was “Managing risks when Implementing a project: The Pneumonia Program Experience….”. Everyone was invited and we completed these session with an CHAI farewell lunch. The lunch was great and our teams shared their feelings and lovely vows to us all. It was absolutely wonderful and we really appreciated their effort.

After farewell over farewell we set another round of appreciations to our CHAI office friends as we have had such a tremendous time working with all. We came in our new traditional dresses (CHAI surprise presents) to our office and Caroline baked lots of cake. So we made an office tour and thank everyone for their encouragement and support.

While working here has been one of the most rewarding experiences in my life, it’s time for me to return to Singapore. I have had a great time working here and will definitely miss my team and my GSK Pulse family.

As someone said “It takes hands to build a house, but only hearts can build a home”.

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3 Comments

robertbohinski December 15, 2017

Nicely written – enjoy the familiar and thank you all for the wonderful memories. I have at least 2 more blogs to write – I’m sure you’ll enjoy the last one which I hope to be the story of all of us and the photos taken from along the road less traveled –